Ivan Mikhailov

This article is about the politician Ivan Mikhailov. For other people, see Iwan Michailow .

Ivan Michajlow Gavrilow (1930s)

Iwan Michajlow Gawrilow (also written Ivan Michailov Gavrilov , Bulgarian Иван Михайлов Гаврилов ; * August 26, 1896 , Novo Selo near Štip , today North Macedonia ; † September 5, 1990 in Rome , Italy ) was a Bulgarian resistance fighter in Macedonia and long-time IM leader (Inner Macedonian Revolutionary Organization).

Life

Ivan Michajlow was born on August 26, 1896 in the village of Novo Selo near the town of Štip in the then Ottoman Empire (now the Republic of Macedonia). He attended the Bulgarian high school for men in Thessaloniki . After the end of the Second Balkan War (1913) and the subsequent annexation of the Macedonian Aegean Sea by Greece and the Wardar of Macedonia by Serbia, he finished his education in the Serbian high school in Skopje. There he met the Serbian heir to the throne and later King of Yugoslavia, Alexander Karađorđević for the first time . After completing his school education with honors in 1915, the Serbian Ministry of Education offered him a scholarship to complete his education in any university in Europe. Ivan Michajlow refused and joined the Bulgarian army in 1918. During the First World War he served in the Bulgarian army. After the Armistice of Solun (1918) he left the army and began studying law at St. Kliment Ohridski University in Sofia. At that time, Todor Alexandrov , the then leader of IMRO , invited him to become his personal secretary in the IMRO representation in Sofia. In the meantime, Ivan Michajlow, together with Jordan Tschkatrow from Prilep and Kristo Veljanow from Kruševo, decided to found a Macedonian student association in Bulgaria. Mikhailov became one of the co-founders and the first chairman of the Vardar student association in Sofia.

Leader of the IMRO

Todor Alexandrov with his cheta

After the murder of his mentor and friend, the then leader of the IMRO, Todor Alexandrov, on August 31, 1924, Ivan Mihailov was elected a member of the IMRO Central Committee and began to punish the murderers of Todor Alexandrov among the supporters of a left-wing split from IMRO ( IMRO-Obedinena ; German: United IMRO). These incidents are known as the "Incidents of Gorna-Dschumaja " (today Blagoevgrad , Bulgaria). In the next few years he became the de facto leader of IMRO. He was a believer in the tactics of individual terror. In the 1920s and 1930s, activists led by Ivan Mihailov were involved in a number of political murders inside and outside Bulgaria. Among them was his future wife Mecha Karnitschewa , who became known through the murder of Todor Panitza , a supporter of the left wing of the IMRO, in the Vienna Burgtheater on May 8, 1925. The attack was ordered by the IMRO, led by Mihailov , because of his murders of the IMRO activists Boris Sarafov and Ivan Garvanov as well as the collaboration with outside powers. Mihailov's main goal was to combat and neutralize the Soviet influence on the Macedonian independence movements, manifested in the form of the IMRO Obedinena. In 1926 he married Mentscha Karnitschewa, with whom he stayed together until the end of her life. The following year, the Serbian government murdered Mihailov's father and older brother, who were then living in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

In response, IMRO planned an attack on the Yugoslav King Alexander, which was successfully carried out by Vlado Chernozemsky in Marseille in 1934 .

In Macedonia

After Mikhailov managed to assert himself as the leader of the IMRO, he became the most important figure in the pursuit of Macedonian independence. The struggle against the Yugoslav (Serbian) government and on the Aegean against the Greek government was renewed throughout Macedonia. He personally planned and carried out attacks on police stations, army bases, bridges, gendarmerie stations, blowing up railway lines and assassinations against members of the government. Due to the actions of the IMRO, the Yugoslav Kingdom stationed an army of 35,000 in Vardar. In addition, police officers and special border troops were deployed. This turned the entire territory of Macedonia, especially Vardar, into a combat zone. The border between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria was heavily fortified by the Yugoslav government. Michajlow then changed his tactics. So-called "revolutionary threes" were formed for attacks, whose actions were directed against local collaborators of the Serbs. The best-known include Traitscho Tschundew , Ipokrat Rawigorow , Ilija Lilinkow , Mara Bunewa and Iwan Momchilow .

Alliance with the Croatian independence movement

In 1929, King Alexander had the old constitution of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the so-called Vidovdan (Saint Vitus Day) constitution, replaced by the constitution of the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia . In contrast to the old constitution, which at least formally recognized the rights of Croats, Slovenes and other population groups (Macedonian Bulgarians were, however, viewed as southern Serbs ), the new constitution only recognized the newly created Yugoslav ethnic group. These circumstances led to the declaration of Sofia , the strategic alliance between Ivan Mikhailov and the Croatian independence movement.

Memorial statue in Sofia

After the coup d'état on May 19, 1934 in Bulgaria by the pro-Serbian Sweno and the accompanying persecution of IMRO in Bulgaria, Michajlow fled Bulgaria to Turkey and later Poland. The first significant collaboration between IMRO and the Croatian Ustasha under Ante Pavelić was the 1934 assassination attempt in Marseille, in which King Alexander, the French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou and the assassin Wlado Tschernosemski were killed. With the creation of the " Independent Croatia ", a vassal state of the Axis powers , Michajlow settled in the Croatian capital Zagreb in 1941.

Second World War

As a staunch anti-communist, Michajlow contacted the Reichsführer of the SS Heinrich Himmler during the Second World War and received his approval for the creation of a battalion of former IMRO activists under German leadership. The planned goal of these units should be the active fight against communist partisans on the territory of Yugoslavia and Greece in the triangle Solun (today: Thessaloniki) - Kostur / Lerin - Larisa . The combat strength should be 5000 to 8000 men. From March 1943 the formation of such battalions began in Kostur, Lerin and Pella under the name " Ohrana ". Shortly before the communists came to power in Bulgaria on September 9, 1944, Ivan Michajlow traveled to Skopje at the request of Adolf Hitler to establish an independent Macedonian state there. However, because Ivan Michajlow saw that the fate of Macedonia was sealed again and that Germany would lose the war, he decided not to proclaim an independent Macedonia in order, in his opinion, to save the people of Macedonia from another senseless bloodshed. Shortly afterwards he left Macedonia for good and settled briefly in succession in Hungary, Germany and Spain until he took up residence in Rome with the consent of the Italian government, where he died in 1990 at an old age.

In exile

In exile, Ivan Mikhailov wrote many brochures and some books. He is the author of 4 volumes of "Memories", "Macedonia - Switzerland of the Balkans", "Stalin and the Macedonian Question" and other works in which he describes the Macedonian struggle for independence. In the meantime, the process of the forced denationalization and Macedonization of the Bulgarian population in Pirin-Macedonia took place behind the Iron Curtain in communist Bulgaria since 1948 by a decision of the Comintern , in preparation for the creation of a Socialist Federative Balkan State including Bulgaria. Only the dispute between Stalin and Tito put an end to this process.

The End

The common grave of Ivan Michajlow and Mentscha Karnitschewa in Rome, Italy

Ivan Michajlow died on September 5, 1990, almost exactly one year before the Republic of Macedonia was declared independent on September 8, 1991 and 16 years before Yugoslavia finally disappeared from the political map of the world on June 3, 2006.

The Radko Knoll on Rugged Island in Antarctica has been named after him since 2009.

See also

• Declaration of Sofia (1929)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ivan Mihaylov: I am a Bulgarian from Macedonia, interview, September 1989. (in Bulgarian)
2. ↑ Video interview with Michajlow in Rome, 1989 (in Bulgarian)
3. ↑ Stefan Troebst: The Macedonian Century . From the beginnings of the national revolutionary movement to the Ohrid Agreement 1893-2001. In: Southeast European Works . tape 140 . Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2007, ISBN 978-3-486-58050-1 .
4. ↑ What was meant was the cooperation of the left wing of the IMRO with the Bolsheviks of Russia and the USSR, founded in 1922, whose aim was to create a socialist federation state in the Balkans, separating the Macedonian from the Bulgarian ethnic group.
5. ↑ Quo vadis, Bulgaria; 1937 Ivan Mikhailov
6. ↑ Official SS document translated into Russian, РГВА. Ф.1372к "Документы управлений войск СС по пенсионному обеспечению германских военнослужащих , служащих войск СС и добровольцев иностранных легионов войск СС и их семей ". Оп.3 Д.446 Л.61-63
7. ↑ Newspaper of the Macedonian Emigrants of Canada (in English) ( MS Word ; 1.8 MB)
8. ↑ unpublished interview of the Macedonian journalist Boris Vishinski from October 1, 1989 published in the newspaper 'Demokratsia', Sofia, January 8, 2001, pp. 10-11 (translated into English) ( Memento of the original from October 6 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.